Alain Servais

Robb Swanson, right, and Doug Wilson hold posters opposing the sculpture chosen to go in front of the arena Tuesday at the Sacramento council meeting. Photo: Jose Luis Villegas

The Sacramento city council unanimously approved funds last night to help purchase a Jeff Koons public sculpture that’s proved contentious amongst some local artists. [The Sacramento Bee]

Collector Alain Servais surveys the effects of amassed wealth across the art industry in his essay, “Art in the Shadow of Market Industrialization”. One depressing but perhaps unsurprising citation: Art prices rise—and rise faster—when income inequality goes up. [SFAQ]

New York upholds its ban on ferrets, inciting the criticism of ferret fans. “I don’t think I’ve ever been let down by my government this much,” said one disappointed New Yorker. [The New York Times]

Artists can say good-bye to the once friendly rent rates at Industry City (if they haven’t already). Jamestown, Belvedere Capital and Angelo Gordon are expected to ask the city for a zone variance to build a hotel on the Industry City waterfront. They plan to invest 1 billion to refurbish the facility. [Crains]

100 best paintings in New York, as chosen by 34 artists, critics, journalists, curators and gallery dealers including yours truly. [Time Out New York]

Are you paying taxes on art bought out of state? A useful tax guide for collectors. [Artnet News]

The clearest definition of post-internet yet: Artists who use the web as a basis for their work but don’t make a big deal out of it. This from a feature on Post-Internet poetry. [The New Yorker]

“The reason more women aren’t editing has to do with leisure inequality” says Jacqueline Mabey, co-founder of the Art+Feminism Wiki-edit-athon. [Artnews]

Love that Hyperallergic does a weekly survey of art crimes. Each crime comes with a Scream icon rating. This seems like the best way to deal with this kind of news, which this week included a couple that had sex in every room of the Erotic Heritage Museum, a couple charged with vandalism for carving their initials into the wall of Rome’s Colosseum. [Hyperallergic]

Because some artists and galleries have no ethical qualms about posting hacked female nudes, there will be an art exhibition about them. [SF Gate]

John Herrman at the Awl gifts a new phrase to the world, “take time.” Use this quip whenever the Internet overreacts to a single event, i.e. nude leak 2014. “Hey, guys, it’s everyone’s ‘take time.’” [The Awl]

Researchers have found that roughly half the viking remains they studied were female. Apparently, previous to this, nobody thought to check the gender. [Tor]

Never afraid to offend, Joan Rivers tells jokes about the Holocaust and her vagina ring, just months ago on The Tonight Show. Host Jimmy Fallon ends the interview by asking Rivers if she’s afraid of death. [YouTube]

Margaret Atwood has become the first contributor Norway’s Future Library, a project by artist Katie Paterson. Every year until 2114, the library will invite one author to contribute a work. In 2114, trees that Paterson planted this summer will be cut down so the work can be printed. [The Guardian]

Procrastinate, for science. Whale.fm crowdsources labor for matching whale calls, to help scientists start to decipher the dialect of Pilot Whales. Try to match the sound in the center of the screen to one of the sound files below. If it’s a match, click the checkmark that pops up next to the audio clip. [Whale.fm]

Randy Kennedy has a nice interview with artist Pierre Huyghe—who “fits into the tidy mold of a museum retrospective about as comfortably as a monkey fits into a dress”—prior to his first Stateside retrospective, set to open November 23 at LACMA. Haha, Randy. [The New York Times]

Artists beware. Bert Kreuk has sued Danh Vo for 1.2 million because he failed to deliver a work worth $350,000 for an exhibition of Kreuk’s collection. The rest of the money is for “damage to his reputation and lost profit.” Collector Alain Servais has suggested over Twitter that Vo may be refusing to deliver the work because Kreuk is “an art-flipper more toxic than [Stefan] Simchowitz” [artnet News]

White guys in power weigh in on graffiti (again). “I find it outrageous that one of the city’s museums is currently celebrating graffiti and what a great impact it had on the city,” says Police chief William Bratton. “The young people who invented this style didn’t have access to art supplies,” says Jeffrey Deitch. “They didn’t have a garage at home where they could work on canvases. They had the streets.” This is so so so so so stupid. [artnet News]

Tom Moody’s got a lot of great posts on his blog right now, including a sympathy letter to artists who made Hissbitch’s Five Worst Net Artists list, and some griping over the meet-up event titled, “Social Media, Art, and The Like Economy”. Moody points to Ryder Ripps’ “Zillion Hits vs The Darger Economy” as a better way to frame the discussion. He’s right, of course, though waiting til you’re dead for fame doesn’t leave much to talk about on a panel like this. That said, Marina Galperina expressed an interest in viral content driven by conflict, so perhaps this panel would have benefited from hosting at least one person who doesn’t give a shit about likes. [Tom Moody]

Speaking of The Like Economy, this NYTimes Bits blog post about how Facebook may actually be suppressing likes you don’t pay for is frightening. [NYTimes]

Carolina Miranda’s post on Richard Jackson will be made into a TV show if she can get enough votes. This is what journalism 2.0 looks like. (Vote for her). [kcet]

Blast from the past: 8 months ago Edward Winkleman posted an excerpt from a newsletter by collector Alain Servais about what he calls “very bankable artists” VBA and the necessity for galleries to “grow or go”. Very prescient. [Edward Winkleman]

Related, in that same post, a number of commentors speculate on the meaning of a tweet I sent out back in August that read, “Art could do without the art world”. To be clear, I was simply referring to the ridiculous apparatus that holds this economy together, which includes a world of bullshit press releases and art lingo, skeevy dealers and curators, and a press corps that eats all this nonsense up. We all have days where we can include ourselves on that list, but hopefully, not too many. [Edward Winkleman]